


Five minutes after...

by asparagusmama



Series: After the end...? [1]
Category: Lewis (TV)
Genre: Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Laura Hobson is awesome, M/M, a fixer to the end, five minutes after the end, gets a teeny bit meta at the end, small offering as I try to get well enough to finish poisoned minds and white, warning- use of the f-word and some other swearing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-16
Updated: 2016-10-16
Packaged: 2018-08-22 20:10:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,007
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8299112
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/asparagusmama/pseuds/asparagusmama
Summary: “Two colleagues work together for years, absolutely no bodily contact. Now, why would that be? Detective?”Set actually 10-15 minutes after the end of the very last episode of Lewis. No spoilers.





	

Of course Hathaway had gone. Of course he was not at the barrier. However, it didn’t take long to find him, he had gone to the nearest coffee franchise, and was standing morosely, staring into space, his eyes burning red, his face at its most blank and shut down. No one but someone who knew him well could read how distraught he was, how close to tears.

Lewis took a deep breath and said, approaching him, “Did you miss me so much?”

James gave a jolt, and spurted his coffee out, choking, spraying over the floor and someone’s suitcase. They didn’t notice, they were too busy embracing two small children and a woman in a paisley patterned hijab.

“Dear God! Don’t do that!” he turned properly to look at Lewis. “What’s wrong? Is there a problem with the flight? Where’s Laura?”

“Nothing’s wrong, Laura’ll be boarded by now, probably about to taxi out onto the runway.”

“Then what the fuck are you doing here Robert?” James asked archly, voice as cold as the ice of the Artic snows in midwinter.

Robbie always hated it when he called him Robert. It was so formal. Hated being called it, to be honest it was only marginally better than being called Bob. He always respected James’ detestation of Jim, once he finally knew. Once, James had called him Robbie, and it had been so wonderful to hear his name on his lips, instead of Sir. But then he had called him Sir, too, at times. And that had been most definitely not at work, but deep in the night, breathless and needy. Robbie hadn’t liked it at first, but then had grown to love it, missed it when it had stopped. When had it stopped? How long before he had turned to Laura?

No, he couldn’t go blaming James here. He had no one but himself to blame. He was desperate to break the silence, to provide James with some sort of answer, when he had none, when it had been Laura, turning on him once they had cleared customs and passport and were waiting for the plane.

“Realised my mistake, didn’t I?” he smiled hopefully.

“Really?”

“Yep!” he widened his smile. He then thought about the situation. “Laura and me, we had words. Six months is a long time to go, Moody might decide I’m too old and broken by then.”

“You left your girlfriend for your job?”

Robbie looked down, and then at the barrier. “Can we go see if they managed to get my luggage off in time?”

James slammed down his cup, which didn’t make such a resounding sound as he would have liked, being cardboard, and stalked off towards the desk for Singapore Airlines. “Fine.”

He stood looming; a mocking air, or at least Lewis felt it was, as he was told, condescendingly, that his luggage was on it’s way to New Zealand, to the runway on the taxiing plane. The woman smiled at Lewis as if he were an idiot. She then, a few taps to the keyboard later, told his insurance didn’t cover it. It would cost him half the price of his non-refundable ticket to get his luggage off at the Hong Kong stopover and returned to England. She printed him off a receipt to show the following morning, and smiled again as if he were mad. Still, when asked why he’d not gone his plane after he’d gone through the departures gate, he couldn’t explain. Besides, what could he say?

“Thank you,” James replied politely, giving the woman an empty smile, as he took Lewis by the elbow and pulled him away. The touch was cold, angry, not what it once was.

And whose fault was that?

 

They walked in silence to the drop-off car park. James had, of course, been far longer than he had planned, and the car was clamped.

“Fuck!” James punched his car’s bonnet. Luckily the Jag wasn’t dented.

Morse would never hurt his car, Lewis thought numbly. He was, after all, a little in shock. He thought he had finally made the right decision, thought he knew what he was doing, where he was going, who he was with... what he was...

James phoned the number on the papers on the windscreen and gave his rank, and bullshitted about a call from work, having to wait while another Inspector cancelled his holiday.

“You’re in trouble if they check.”

“They won’t. They’re bringing forms for me to give to Moody for him to reclaim then reimburse me. I’ll have to just bin them.”

He leant on the bonnet, pulling a packet of cigarettes, and lighting one.

Lewis suddenly wanted one, despite only every being a social smoker back in Newcastle, back in the seventies...

The seventies, the decade before this man was even born.

“I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“Getting you out of bed so early. Getting your car clamped.”

“I’d have got out of bed to take Dr Hobson to the airport, regardless of you and what you wanted Robert. She’s my friend. I think. A good colleague, anyway.”

“You don’t blame her then...?”

“For what Robert?”

“You know, you... me.... me... her...”

James shrugged and flicked away his fag. “How can I blame her? She had no idea. No one did. It was the way you wanted it.”

“She knows now,” Robbie heard himself mutter.

“Yeah. I got that,” James bit out spitefully.

“I can get the bus if you want...”

“Perhaps you should have offered that before you let me leave my car unattended for so long.”

“I’ll pay for the clamp, ’course I will. I could still go after that.”

“No, no it’s fine Robbie,” James said quietly, looking away and down, almost shyly, almost reminiscent of the early days. Before they got together, before he noticed James...

“Thanks man,” Robbie replied, reaching out to touch his arm, pulling back quickly as James flinched. He looked about, scanning for the van to release the clamp, looking for something to say, to clear the air. They never used to be so awkward, once if they were quiet, it was comfortable. “Glad you’re calling me Robbie again. I hate it when you call me Robert.”

“I do that when I’m angry with you. Robert.”

“Must be angry with me a lot,” Robbie half-joked.

“Yes. I am. Robert.”

 

After another ten minutes or so, in which James just surfed the ’net on his phone, smirking at something, as well as not answering three calls from Nell, and Lewis had walked away off and had phoned Lyn to say that he wasn’t going to New Zealand after all, and it was too complex to explain, but she wasn’t to worry, a white van pulled up and a cheerful man – far to cheerful, considering how rude every person he must meet would be – charged Lewis’ card then unclamped the car, telling James that if he had phoned a minute later the car would have been towed.

“That lad was the spit of Sean Hughes,” Lewis tried, smiling, as he got into James’ black Jag. Why did James have this big black showy car? Wasn’t like him at all. Where did it come from? Was it his Dad’s? Lewis looked out of the window and felt his eyes burn with unshed tears, watching the cars in the other lane, cars on the exit roads and the M25. How could he have not noticed how hostile, brittle and broken, James had been these last four years? How could he have deluded himself that James had really been as happy for him and Laura? How could he have pretended it was just a fling for James and him, and then how it didn’t happen at all?

How could he use Laura like that? For years? She was his friend.

He doubted she was now.

Perhaps if he’d been honest in the first place?

“I’m sorry.”

“For what Robert?”

“For breaking your heart.”

James snorted, and let out a painful little sigh. “Bit late for that.”

“Is it?”

James didn’t answer. Perhaps he was concentrating on the heavy traffic as they queued slowly and painfully to get onto the M40.

“I have no self respect left you know,” James said softly into the silence.

“No lad, don’t say that. You...”

“I spent my free time either alone, wondering what I did wrong, wondering why you couldn’t even dump me before taking up with Dr. Hobson. Or I spend it caring for a man who doesn’t know me, who made my entire childhood and teenage years and early twenties an utter misery. I trusted you. But it was obviously a daddy-crush, as the office gossip used to go. All I had left was my job, but you didn’t leave me alone, did you Robert?” James hissed the last bit out in angry venom. “I tried. I tried for Laura. You’d made your bed and it wasn’t her fault. We always both loved you. I suppose I was experimentation. Or a quick screw ’til you felt you could give your heart again. Six months! Six months to put my broken self back together with sticky tape and muddle on. Why the fuck are you here Robbie? Why?” He almost wailed his last question, the anger and self-hatred vanishing to reveal the raw pain underneath, the pain he hid under his mask of the deadeyes and blank face of the stern Detective Inspector.

The car veered and skidded into the next lane before James regained control of the car and apparent control over his own emotions. Lewis let out the breath he didn’t know he was holding.

“I’m sorry. I made a mistake. A lot of them. But James, love, you weren’t an experiment. I got scared.”

“Scared?”

“Aye. Scared. After what you put yourself through, what Will and Feadoracha went through, you can understand that. Can’t you? Eh, lad?”

James was silent for a good many moments; he slowed the car down and the pulled off the motorway at High Wycombe. He glanced at Lewis, but didn’t answer; just sighed deeply as he pulled the car into a bus stop on the first road he exited once over the motorway.

“No Robert. Not from you. Not after all you said. I spent – spend! – so many nights asking myself what I did wrong, and you tell me it was just being a man. No. If that was the case...?”

“I don’t know!” Robbie interrupted. “It was like someone took over my life. Over Laura’s life! She didn’t seem to be the woman she was! I think we both knew it was a mistake straight away, we were close, but friends, maybe like brother and sister, the sex... never mind, you don’t need to know that. Somehow, in that departures lounge, Laura saw the truth, all at once, she saw how we once were, how we felt each other. She let me go to be with you, man! I didn’t know it, but I can see it now. I love you James, and I know I’ve treated you like shit. And I don’t know what to do about it!” he yelled.

“Well,” James said softly, a twitch of a smile ghosting his lips, “at least we’re talking about our feelings, that’s a start. What to we do now?”

Lewis took a deep breath. “Well,” he said, “I haven’t a clue. But I’m starved. How about breakfast while we continue this new ‘talking about feelings’ stuff while it lasts. Even if we go nowhere, it can only be an improvement, right?”

James huffed a small laugh. “Alright. It’s a beginning, anyway.” He pulled out into the traffic and followed the signs to the nearest superstore. He would see what breakfast would bring. He wondered what Laura had seen, and thanked her for stopping the nonsense. He was right, he had no self-respect, he adored Robbie with all his heart, and would forgive him and take him back in an instant.

But Robert didn’t need to know that yet.

**Author's Note:**

> My family sent me on holiday to the caravan for a fortnight and I was going to finish Poisoned Minds, but was shocked to find out even with a lot of stress and distractions removed my mind/brain is still stupid following the seizures last year. Will do it asap, promise! I do worry this doesn't read like my usual stuff and I've lost it. Hopefully it will serve :)
> 
> My notes for this just said  
> "Two colleagues work together for years, absolutely no bodily contact. Now, why would that be Detective?"  
> and  
> "God hates pigeons, tell him."  
> I'm not sure how the second quote fits in, and I didn't manage too. Sorry! :)


End file.
